ZOOM Event: Galleries in Motion with Joy Pepe, Part II

WE THE PEOPLE: SCENES OF AMERICAN LIFE

Presented by Joy M. Pepe, Art History Faculty,
University of Hartford and Central Connecticut State University

Through the imagery of paintings, sculpture and photography, this two-part series will explore a variety of depictions of people and places that contribute to the diversity of American life from the 18th century through the present. We will consider the representations of African-Americans and Native Americans in these various media, as well as the monied class that lived alongside them. Throughout, a number of representations of American presidents will be interspersed, from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Barack Obama.

Part II Wednesday, February 24 PM online on Zoom.

“Keep exploring. Keep asking why. Don’t settle for what you already know. Never stop believing in the power of your ideas, your imagination, your hard work to change the world.”

Barack Obama (b. 1961; in office 2009-2017)

In the second part of this series we will explore some images of the American Gilded age, as well as the reality of work and race in New York at the beginning of the 20^th C. We will continue to look at the lives of ordinary people in Regionalist works and at some from the enormous series of works of the diaspora from the South of the African American by Jacob Lawrence. We will consider the early twentieth century use of Native Americans in the Buffalo Bill theatrical spectacles. We consider the portrayal of presidents in the FDR memorial in Washington D.C, and the controversy of suggesting his physical limitations, and finally the breaking of pictorial conventions in the portrait of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, to the ground breaking contemporary images by Kehinde Wiley of Barack Obama and Amy Sherald of Michelle Obama.

To register for this event, contact Guilford Free Library